How to handle .appsody config and repos without codewind-workspace

[makandre]

Codewind version:
OS:

Che version:
IDE extension version:
IDE version:
Kubernetes cluster:

Question synopsis:

Currently there are instructions telling users to make their local appsody CLI use the same configuration as Codewind's. This allows them to add a repo in their local CLI, and it shows up in Codewind.

This is possible because Codewind's .appsody configuration folder is in codewind-workspace which is mounted from host system into PFE. But this will becoming impossible when the mount goes away.

Questions:

1. Do we still support adding repo in CLI and it shows up in Codewind? (i.e. data flowing from Appsody CLI -> Codewind)

2. Or, now that there's a template manager, do we only support adding appsody repo via template manager?

3. If it is the second, there will be a problem for bind scenario (Support binding existing project to appsody #292) if there's no data flowing from Codewind -> Appsody CLI. Consider this scenario:

   1. user adds repoX in Codewind, which has stackY in it
   2. user wants to bind an existing non-appsody project to stackY
   3. during that bind, codewind-installer runs appsody init stackY none. This will fail, because the Appsody CLI does not know about repoX nor stackY

[tobespc]

We should be able to still do option 1 when this is all finished. The smarts is all going to be in the inital creation of the build container but I don't think it will break current behaviour

[makandre]

Discussed with @tobespc today.

We concluded there's no good way to continue support for option 1 once the codewind-workspace mount is gone. Ultimately, to add a repo a user would need to add the index.yaml via Appsody CLI and add the corresponding index.json via Codewind CLI.

That leaves option 2, meaning users will be expected to only add repos via template manager in IDEs. But additionally for Appsody style repos, IDE also need to add the corresponding index.yaml using Appsody CLI.

Alternatively, if IDEs switch to use cwctl templates repos for templates management, then perhaps cwctl is the one that calls Appsody CLI; and maybe we can do this in a generic manner using an extension command (like how it calls appsody init), but this needs to be investigated.

@deboer-tim @jopit your thoughts?

[jopit]

Investigate if we can make the cli extensible so that it can invoke function in an extension in a generic way.
IDEs would have to call template cli calls instead of the REST APIs (change already in flight for hybrid)
Portal team to work with Andrew on this.

[makandre]

For the proposal above IDEs need to call CLI for template repos management, which is tracked by #841

Also repo needs a unique ID: #848

[makandre]

A couple of appsody bugs that need to be fixed for this work:

appsody/appsody#522
appsody/appsody#523

[makandre]

All changes in